missing git documentation for "git clone --recursive"

missing git documentation for "git clone --recursive"

[markusd112]

Hi,

I am missing the argument "--recursive" for the git clone command in the 
git-clone documentation

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-clone

Is this --recursive argument outdated? In some projects there is the 
following command in the documentation that clones the repository 
including init and update submodules:

git clone --recursive (url)

In the git documentation only "--recurse-submodules" is mentioned as 
allowed argument, but not "--recursive".

Thanks

Markus

Re: missing git documentation for "git clone --recursive"

[Junio C Hamano]

markusd112@web.de writes:

> In the git documentation only "--recurse-submodules" is mentioned as 
> allowed argument, but not "--recursive".

Correct.  Do not use it.

In the early days, we mistakenly used "--recursive" to mean
"--recurse-submodules".  

After we realized the mistake, we would have preferred if we could
remove it right away, but in order to avoid breaking existing users,
the command is taught to still notice "--recursive" and behave the
same as "--recurse-submodules", but stopped advertising the former
in "git clone -h" and "git clone --help".

This reminds me.  Perhaps we would want to perform an audit for
such OPT_HIDDEN aliases and remove them at the Git 3.0 boundary
(this needs a separate thread to discuss)?

Re: missing git documentation for "git clone --recursive"

[D. Ben Knoble]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2026 at 3:35 PM <markusd112@web.de> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I am missing the argument "--recursive" for the git clone command in the
> git-clone documentation
>
> https://git-scm.com/docs/git-clone
>
> Is this --recursive argument outdated? In some projects there is the
> following command in the documentation that clones the repository
> including init and update submodules:
>
> git clone --recursive (url)
>
> In the git documentation only "--recurse-submodules" is mentioned as
> allowed argument, but not "--recursive".
>
> Thanks
>
> Markus

The latter is a (now-undocumented) alias for the former. See
5c387428f1 (parse-options: don't emit "ambiguous option" for aliases,
2019-04-29) and referenced commits (like ccdd3da652 (clone: Add the
--recurse-submodules option as alias for --recursive, 2010-11-04)) for
some details.

-- 
D. Ben Knoble